Education & Communication

Outreach of Synthetic Biology

Aid Education in Montainuous Areas

This summer, we got the oppurtunity of going to aid education for elementary school students in the mountainous areas in Guangxi Province, China. Elementary students are at the life stage where their curiosity for knowledges explode. Team members taught local students about the basic biological knowledge of molecules and cells, and how scientists today want to build artificial cell system, especially in bacteria, using these milecules and structures.

In another class, our team members introducing the history of information recording in human civilization and the development of human space exploration in the past 100 years. Students were engouraged to discuss the future of human space exploration and how life would be in the space.

We engourage an open atmosphere for these young students to ask questions and share anything they want. Althogh never get in touch with synthetic biology, they were quicklyenamoured by the idea of synthesizing life! Maybe some of them would become the next generation of synthetic biology scientists in the future!

To University Freshmen

Apart from the young children, we still introduce iGEM and synthetic biology to the freshmen of our university in the academic sharing course. We briefly introduced synthetic biology and how iGEM has promoted the development by gathering a lot of ambitious young people together. We then share with them our project, which arised lots of students' interests. A lot of interesting questions were asked in the Q&A session. We welcomed the freshmen students to visit our lab and encouraged them to participate in next year's team selection in November.

Education on Space synthetic Biology

Questionnaire on Synthetic Biology and Bio-safety in the Space

After knowing each other also working in the field of space synthetic biology, ShanghaiTech_China and us immediately had a little meetup and shared our ideas of conducting public education. Finally, we decided to carry out some work together, and that included doing a survey on bio-safety issue in the range of space biology and giving a open course on this topic online.

Here's the results of
our questionnaire!

Through this questionnaire, we hope to understand the public's cognition and views on biosecurity, especially to strengthen the public's awareness of the issues that need to be paid attention to when conducting bacterium-based researches in the space.
In our survey, 97.1% of people answered our questions about biosecurity well, while only 1.6 percent had no idea about it at all. However, when asked about the understanding of biotechnology research, only 56.29% of people said they understood the relevant technical specifications, which means that there's a neccisity to carry out biosafety-related science popularization to the public. We excluded six invalid responses out of 485 to arrive at the following data:

Further, we want to know how the public thinks about the background of our project -- Mars migration and space exploration. 67.22% of the respondents believe that it is very necessary for us to carry out deep space exploration, while only 3.3% of the respondents are opposed to deep space exploration, which proves the necessity of our project from the perspective of the project background to a certain extent.

We need to understand the problems associated with microbial culture in space/alien environments. By collecting the answers to the other options, we learned that the cultivation of microorganisms in space needs to consider more conditions besides space radiation, temperature, microgravity, nutrient supply, such as vacuum environment, high pressure, etc., which is important for us to further ask experts and conduct environmental simulation.

Based on our previous questions, we know that nearly 60% of the respondents are familiar with biosafety-related knowledge. Further, we would like to understand public attitudes and perceptions when space/alien exploration is combined with microbial culture.
An average composite score of the collected data shows that mutated microbes in space are considered the most significant threat to Earth, while space station/isoscale threats are considered less of a concern. And nearly 75% of the respondents believed that we should be careful about the microbes on the planets in the process of exploring planets, which means that the respondents have a high biosafety awareness. This reminds us of the impact of our projects on the outer space environment and means that we do need to consider on the potential biosafety issues of microbes in space.

Conclusions of the questionnaire:
We received a total number of 485 responses. By analyzing the composition of the respondents, we found that the masses do not have much idea about the new storage technology of DNA storage, however, the information density of DNA storage is the largest among known storage and the cost of raw materials itself is the lowest, therefore, it is necessary to conduct public science lectures on DNA storage technology.

Joint Open Course with ShanghaiTech

In cooperation with University of Science and Technology Shanghai, we presented a special lecture on space - DNA storage in interstellar information transportation in space, introducing DNA information storage technology and implementation methods, possible difficulties encountered in space transportation, and the outlook for the future to more than 100 high school students.

About the Connection bewteen Science Fiction, Space and Synthetic Biology

It is notable that the popular science fictions usually represent the public's attitude towards a certain technology. Meanwhile, an excellent science fictions such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Three bodies can also lead to a technology hit for decades.So we believe that a servey about biology science fiction can really show us people's attitude towards biotechnology, space and synthetic biology in a different versions.What 's more , using science fictions as a way of education are bound to be a effective way to promote our Odyssey.
The idea to dig into science fictions first appeared when we were designing our homepage. Using a science fiction to show how our Odyssey can be applied and how it may stand out from other storage technology, we naturally got interested in how people may react to this kind of expression on novel technology.Before we turned to the public for data collection, we first interviewed our school's science fiction club to get some professional opinions through Wechat.
Surprisingly, though it was remarked as a interesting idea to wirte a science fiction to promote our project, our interviewees were concerned about people's reaction when they read about the biology part in the fictions as biology usually had a vicious images in popular science fictions , bringing about disasters ,pandemics, and ethical problems.
Knowing the fact that people may be indifferent to the Odyssey fictions, we distributed a questionnaires to find out the reason for people's hostility to synthetic biology.
According to the final result , we find that for those who read science fictions(technically,science fictional movies and games are also included),50% of candidates say that the biotechnologies are frequently mentioned and left a deep impression to them,(fig 1) while the other half also agreed to read about biotechnology too. It seems that biotechnology is a unreplaceable part of science fictions.

However , the most acknowledged opinions on biotechnology is still pessimistic.78% of feedbacks expresses worries and attentions from both readers and writers.

Meanwhile,though synthetic biology is booming today it still only takes up 53% of all kinds of biology catagories appeared in fictions, far less than microbiology and cloning.

But there's still good news for biology,or literally, synthetic biology.All our candidates are willing to witness the development of biology, though with some concerns. As a result ,we believe that appropriate promotion is able to eliminate people's fears and concerns towards biotechnology such as GMO or cloning.To put this idea into practice, we record several classic fictions about space synthetic biology into podcasts.

A Podcast about The Martian

The conversation between our team and the science fiction club in our university promoted us to think about the connection of science fiction, space and life. Knowing the fact that people lack the knowledge about space synthetic biology , we launched a podcast program on Ximalaya(A popular Chinese radio website) and Podcast for sharing interesting science fictions regarding the theme on life and space. Ximalaya is one of the most popular poscast app in Chinese market, many people listsning to a variaty of materials on it. We believe in this way, we can be more accessible to the public and share our thoughts to a wider audiences around the country.
In the series Ⅰ we shared the audiobook version of the famous science fiction --The Martian which involves lots of interesting space synthetic biology knowledge in it as the hero himself cultivating potatoes on Mars! The program received well on both site, with more than 600 people listening to it.

Education on DNA Data Storage Technology

Survey on DNA Data Storage Technologies in Public

DNA Storage and Space Transportation Understanding Questionnaire:

DNA data storage is one of the basic ideas of our project. We have recognized the important role of DNA data storage shall play in future human life. To be honest, in 2017, the Financial Times named DNA data storage as "50 Ideas to Change the World". In 2019, the World Economic Forum regard it as one of the breakthroughs expected to radically impact the global socio-economic order. In 2021, Prof Chunhai Fan described the future of DNA data storage by depicting, "In the next 5 to 15 years, Chinese scientists will claim that, only one tube of DNA can record the current data of the entire world."
We have then determined at the beginning of our project to conduct public education and communication in this area, helping people to understand this technology which is due to change and shape our future life.
We doing this by firstly conducting a survey on this topic, to help us better identify our audiences and do education work.
There are 99 respondant and our analysis is below!
Through this questionnaire, we hope to understand the public's knowledge and perception of information storage, and in particular, we hope to deepen the public's interest in DNA information storage.

In our survey, 88% of people believe that interstellar migration is possible for humans, and 77% believe that information exchange with Earth is one of the necessary conditions for interstellar migration. This proves to some extent the importance of information exchange and storage in the case of interstellar migration, and provides an application-level rationale for our project.

Further, we need to understand what the public considers to be the most important for DNA information storage. Ninety-six percent of respondents considered the stability of the vector to be critical for DNA information storage, and 80% of respondents considered the security of the vector to be important, which affects its impact on the environment.In addition, DNA information storage as a carrier of large amounts of information and genetic material for transporting organisms was considered by 80% of the respondents to have good applications for space transportation.

Finally, we interviewed the public about what information they thought should be stored in DNA, and most respondents thought that knowledge of art, culture, technology, and history could be stored in DNA, while others thought that the gene pool of all living things on Earth could be stored.

Collaboration with Tianjin to Write a Little Brochure about DNA Data Storage

We are so glad to have Tianjin as our partnership who is also working in the field of DNA data storage. In one of our online meetups, we shared the questionnaire results mentioned above with them and it is under no hesitation that we determine to collaborate in human practices to popularize DNA data storage.
In another meetup, we share and learn the newly-published Blue Book. It is a handbook written by famous professors and some of them from both our two universities. It mainly introduces DNA data storage thoroughly in a professional perspective. We were suddenly inspired by this little handbook and decided to make a little handbook our own targeted the publics and other teams in the iGEM community who has little knowledges about DNA data storage.
We hope this can be a guidance and brief introduction to let other teams get to know DNA data storage quickly so that they can equip with the overall picture of this technology in the project design. To the public, we are hoping that they can therefore have a clearer understanding of this world-changing technology. And we were very glad to see that some related innovations have gain a large scale of attention among ordinary people. (This conclusion is drawn as the news concerning scientists storing the Dunhuang frescoes in DNAs has been up in the hot search list of Weibo, a popular Chinese microblogging)

Click here to read and download our brochure!

A Series of Wechat Push

DNA storage technology has experienced more than two decades of rapid development and has had a significant impact in both academia and industry. However, according to our preliminary survey, the public's understanding of DNA information storage is not sufficient and does not match the rapid development of the technology. Therefore, after discussion, SJTU-BioX-Shanghai and Tianjin decided to launch a Seven Day Push campaign to popularize the knowledge related to DNA information storage to the public in terms of development history, challenges and opportunities, and various high-powered applications.DNA storage technology has experienced more than two decades of rapid development and has had a significant impact in both academia and industry. However, according to our preliminary survey, the public's understanding of DNA information storage is not sufficient and does not match the rapid development of the technology. Therefore, after discussion, we decided to launch a one-week push campaign to popularize the knowledge related to DNA information storage to the public in terms of development history, challenges and opportunities, and various high-powered applications. According to our statistics,Ourpushs have garnered thousands of views and received extensive feedback.

Sending Emails for Wider Audience

However, the Wechat push we made above were targeted the public, that is , we were dedicating in helping people with even no idea of DNA formation and constructions to understand what DNA data storage is in a camparison to electonic storage. However, much of our readers, who are most likely to be the students of our universities, might be more curious to learn it deeper. Therefore, to further enhance the public's understanding of DNA information storage, we also launched the "Seven Day Articles" activity. We welcomed readers of our wechat pushes to subscribe our more academic articles if they wannna more information from an much more professional perspective.
We emailed the science article to 71 readers who subscribed to our campaign. We first introduce the theoretical background that supports the rapid development of DNA information storage technology, starting from the technical background. Then we introduce the technical contents of DNA information storage, including synthesis, modification, information encryption, encapsulation, and sequencing. Finally, we introduce the application scenarios of DNA information storage and the fields in which it can bring about changes, bringing readers a comprehensive understanding of DNA information storage technology.